Is Sam Bankman-Fried a "trained-on-jargon" cyborg?

Hito Steyerl on Big Tech's pyramid schemes, the importance of human labor and the mediocrity of AI

Described by some as art’s most important person, Hito Steyerl is certainly one of AI’s smartest critics. So I was thrilled today to have the notable German filmmaker, writer and artist on KEEN ON. She didn’t disappoint. I was struck by her critique of big tech as a controller of the tools of creation. And I particularly enjoyed her observation that Sam Bankman-Fried might already be a “trained-on-jargon” robot spouting mostly mediocre garbage. Given Bankman-Fried’s mostly incoherent defense this week of his pyramid scheme at FTX, I suspect Hito Steyerl might be right.

Above all, Steyerl reminds us of the political importance of human labor in the age of generative AI. This is a message that was also articulated by the New York Times economics guru David Leonhardt, another KEEN ON guest this week, who directly connects the end of the American Dream with the demise of organized American labor in the Eighties. Leonhardt and Steyerl come at things in quite different ways, but their conclusion is uncannily similar. Organized labor, they both argue, is the key to fixing the future.

Back in 2018, I published How To Fix the Future which had a chapter on labor and the precariat of the gig economy. “Powerfully argued”, the book’s marketing materials proclaimed. In truth, however, it wasn’t argued powerfully enough. Both Hito Steyerl and David Leonhardt remind us that the economics and particularly politics of human labor is the central issue of our post neo-liberal AI age. Much more of this, both on KEEN ON and here on Substack. Stay tuned.